How to Harness the Power of Email at Every Stage of Your Buyer’s Journey

To retain the clients you have and attract new business, your emails must produce results. It's all about optimizing your email content during the buyer's journey to generate high-quality leads, nurture prospects and guide them to conversions.

This article will take a deep-dive into delivering emails based on your visitor's buyer journey.

Understanding the Stages of the Buyer's Journey

Consumers love to research, compare and review products online before buying anything. With today's complex buyer's journey, your email marketing needs different types of content for all the stages of the path to a purchasing decision. Once you know each stage of the buyer's journey, you can provide your target audience with the fresh and relevant content they need to guide them along the sales funnel.

Here are the three stages of the buyer's journey that you should understand for adapting your email content strategies:

Awareness –

This is the time when buyers start researching online to get a better idea about the products and services that interest them. When they research for a solution to their problem, maybe they will find your business and subscribe to your newsletter. Now that you have their email, you can start nurturing your lead with targeted email content. Since this is the earliest stage of your buyer's journey, provide more educational information about your brand and products before your lead moves on to the next stage.

Consideration –

At this point, your prospects know more about what they want. They've researched case studies and reviews from other buyers. They've defined what it is they need, and if you can help them. Now is the time to entice your prospects with more product details and offers. Sending emails is ideal at this stage because you can offer valuable information to your leads without overwhelming them.

Decision –

At this stage of the buyer's journey, your prospects identify the companies and products that can help them with their problems. They narrow down their choices to the ones they've built a trusting relationship with and feel a comfortable and honest connection. They're ready to begin the final purchasing decision process. Keep your emails clear, helpful and consistent to seal the deal.

Follow Up –

Although this isn't a stage in the buyer's journey, it is essential for retaining your current customers and gathering information for improving your products and services. Include surveys and feedback forms in your follow-up email strategies. This lets your customers know that you value their opinions about their purchases and also keeps you in contact with them.

By continuing this connection with your customers, you strengthen your relationships. With these types of personalized emails, your customers are more likely to recommend your products to others, providing your business with more leads. The more your email campaign focuses on the individual needs of your customers, the better ROI you'll see.

Understand Your Buyers' Personas for Creating Personalized Emails

Before starting your email marketing campaign, it's important to understand your buyers' personas. Once you know their goals, needs and preferences, you can create emails that relate personally to your prospects. This is the start of building relationships that foster trust and brand value. When you build your buyers' personas, it gives you in-depth insights to guide your email content creation.

To start developing your buyers' personas, take advantage of demographic information. You can find some relevant data about your website visitors from Google Analytics. You can dig even deeper into understanding your buyers with online surveys, website forms, sales team feedback and conversations on social media platforms.

Types of Email Content for Each Stage of the Buyer's Journey

It's important to provide the right information to support each stage of the buyer's journey. Every email you send should help your buyers identify, diagnose and decide on a course of action that leads them to a purchasing decision. If you're not sure of the types of content for each stage, here are a few suggestions that explain the type of email content that gets the bests results:

Awareness stage

This is the time when you can introduce your subscribers to your brand, products and services. Send personalized welcome emails that engage your prospects early in their journey, creating value for your brand. To do this, use the buyers' personas that you already created, targeting each prospect with educational content. Also, always include a call-to-action with every email and newsletter. At this stage, your emails should include informative material about your products, such as:

Consideration stage

Continue strengthening your relationship with your prospects by sending promotional emails that delve deeper into the value of your brand. Define your unique selling proposition (USP) by describing what makes your business stand apart from the competition. Also, explain the quality, reliability, transparency and customer satisfaction that you have to offer. In other words, let your prospects know why they should buy from you. At this stage, your emails can include:

Decision stage

At this final purchasing stage, your emails should give the little nudge your prospects need to close the deal. Providing customer reviews and testimonials are effective for helping your subscribers relate to actual satisfied customers. This builds the credibility of your brand and humanizes your business.

When reading testimonials, your leads can imagine themselves benefiting from your products. In addition to testimonials and reviews, try including the following content in your emails to help put your prospects over the top or re-engage inactive prospects:

Wrapping Up

If you want a successful email campaign, embrace the buyer's journey and gear everything toward it. Develop personal emails aimed at specifically answering the questions raised at each stage of the journey, providing only the information your buyers need at that time. Understanding your buyer's journey is essential to optimize your email marketing campaign for nurturing valued customers and long-term success.

About the Author:

Kevin George - the Head of Marketing at leading email design and coding brand, EmailMonks - specializes in crafting beautiful email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and email templates HTML free. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes ‘email marketing.’ He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing tips and best practices at his email marketing blog.